WARNING: This feature discusses confronting and triggering topics.

Danielle Laidley has smoked ice for eight days and not slept. It’s a Sunday in mid-2020 and the time had come, she thinks amid the self-destruction, to leave this world.

At home, she has a shower, puts on new lingerie and prepares for her suicide. She has more ice this night than she’s ever had before.

In her smoke-filled bathroom – her naughty room – she’s alone, determined and a helpless figure. She calls friends and babbles incoherently. She hears voices. She doesn’t hear reasoning. Next to her is a syringe and a liquid drug with the street name Grievous Bodily Harm.

The time has come.

Go on. Do it. Now.

She injects the drug to numb the pain, and just like a helpless patient gives in to anaesthetic, Danielle gives into the darkness that envelopes her. She has tried to suicide twice. She has thought about it many times before.

This day, with ice winning the war and the depressant GHB doing the killing, Danielle is leaving a wretched world. A world in which once she was Dean, and wanted to be Danielle, and all while those two worlds were immersed in fear, vulnerability, addiction, deception and shame.

Complex doesn’t scratch the surface when describing Danielle. She is a father, a former husband, a sister, a daughter, a premiership player and a former AFL coach who hid a great secret that took an enormous toll on her life. A secret exposed when she was arrested in May 2020 and police leaked photos of her in a wig and make-up.

Altogether, she’s a story and an inspiration. She’s a hero. And she’s brave, maybe braver than anyone you know.

Today, she’s a proud, contented transgender woman, happily living with her partner, and she is allowing the world to come and see, feel and understand her life. It’s beyond astounding.

But this night, back in her ensuite bathroom, Danielle is death-riding herself.

“I was at such a low point in my life,” Danielle says.

“I locked myself in the bedroom and made the contraption.

“I had been smoking ice for about eight or nine days, I hadn’t been to sleep. I had been planning it for a while, a few months. I just thought I was at the front of the queue.

“So, I overdosed on GBH, which knocks you out if you have too much and then the contraption goes to work.

“You slump or whatever, and it was the banging and gasping for air, and my flatmate sort of got through the door, got hold of me, and … yeah, I’m still here.

“The other time, I overdosed on sleeping tablets. That was just after I finished in the AFL – I think 2016.”

Looking back, Danielle says she was “mentally insane”.

“The first time was just a case of depression, you know. I did it without any thought,” she said.

“The second one, I was very lucky. I’d always thought about it often, through my whole life, really, on and off when I got into a bad spot, but I could stick my head into football and everything would go OK.

“I have to say, I was always scared of the … I don’t know … the 10 or 15 minutes before I’d set everything up and I was always scared of starting the act.

“This night, I have to say, I was mentally insane.

“I was ringing people, going off, and, yeah, I did it. I was completely insane and I look back now and that person wasn’t me.

“I didn’t want to leave the world but I just thought this position I’d got myself into, there was no way out.”

The addiction bonfire

Danielle took her first illicit drug at 48. She’s now 55. There’s a whole other story before the drugs, of a woman living as a man for four decades, but it was the drugs that nearly killed her

She had pulled bongs at high school and that was it, choosing footy over the streets, and her next interaction with drugs came via cocaine and pills two years shy of her 50th birthday.

Danielle says it made her feel “10 feet tall”.

“My family on the Laidley side has a disease of addiction,” she says. ”I was determined to break the cycle of that. I never really drank, I did a bit of pot at school, no hard stuff. And those things manifested after I left the AFL.

“For a 15-year-old, it became my footy career and then my coaching career. I became a workaholic. That was my addiction. When I was struggling, I would stick my head in the solace of my job.

“It became a vicious cycle for me and when I left the AFL, in 2015 or 2016, whenever it was, I didn’t have my football career to stick my head in.

“All of a sudden there was a void of not being attached to a tribe. You’re by yourself, which was the first time in my life that had happened to me. I was 48 then.

“I got introduced to cocaine and it started off one night a week, one night a weekend, two nights a weekend, then a sneaky night during the week, then it started to grow and grow and I got lost.

“It became this whirlpool of … I was always living in fear, in shame and in embarrassment of my gender identity, and now I had this other problem that manifested out of my family history, and I was too scared to reach out to anyone.

“By this time, for the first time, I’m finding out from medical practitioners about myself and it just became, you know, it was just a bonfire waiting for the match.”

The bonfire soon raged.

There are countless stories, in her new book Don’t Look Away, such as a six-day bender on ice and cocaine in Las Vegas and not sleeping a minute, and, closer to home, accepting his life membership of the Kangaroos “cooked” on ice. He was living as Danielle but being thanked by the club for being Dean.

‘‘When I left the AFL, I started to emotionally transition,” she said.

“I still hadn’t seen anyone professionally. I started self-medicating on HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and then it got to the point where I thought ‘Gee, I need to do something about this’.

“I was putting these hormones in my body and I didn’t know if I was doing too much or not enough.”

As she struggled with her emerging identity, ice began to take its hold.

“From that point on, the next 18 months, where it was just horrific, the ice use,” she says.

The life membership is a challenging night.

She arrives affected by ice, she says she is treated shabbily by the club, she dislikes host Tony Jones, and she leaves as soon as possible – to go home for another ice hit.

There are wonderfully warm stories, too. Recent stories. Like the night Kangaroos tough guy Glenn Archer, and others, shed tears when Danielle told her story to a group of teammates upstairs at Dimattina’s in Lygon St, Carlton.

Or the time former teammate David King took her to a poker night at Anglers Tavern in Maribyrnong.

Her stories are amazing for their love and tenderness, and others for their spinechilling audacity and sadness.

‘Junkyard Bitch’

She likes being called Danielle or Dani. Sometimes “Laids”.

Former teammate Wayne Schwass jokingly calls her the “Junkyard Bitch”. Danielle’s nickname when she played was Junkyard Dog, which she hated, but which suited her because she played for keeps, both verbally and physically.

She loves Junkyard Bitch. She also loves how her brother, Paul, likes to say she was an arsehole brother but is a fabulous sister.

“That’s true. He actually says that reasonably often,” Danielle says.

She talks of her gender dysphoria and how her search to be Danielle started as a child. You’d like to call it an adventure – but it wasn’t.

There are countless times when, having finished coaching for the day at North Melbourne – or at Port Adelaide, St Kilda and Carlton, where she was an assistant coach – that she would drop her footy suit and put on women’s clothes.

“Through playing and coaching, any opportunity I could get to be myself, I would,” she says. “If that meant not socialising post-game, or being at function midweek and getting out of there early, that’s how it shaped, if you like.”

While married, and with her wife at work and the kids at school, Danielle would scamper to the back shed, pull out the box where women’s clothes were kept, pick an outfit, dab on the make-up and plonk herself on the living room couch and watch her beloved Bengals.

Or the time, on her way to The Hellfire Club in Carlton – for the straight, gay, kinky, trans and whatever else takes your fancy – she was stopped by police at a breath-testing station. Danielle was dressed in women’s clobber and her face was awash with make-up but, thankfully, she wasn’t recognised by the cop.

She abandoned her plans for the evening because an Essendon player was in the queue to get into the joint and she didn’t want to get caught.

DON’T MISS: Exclusive extracts form Danielle Laidley’s memoir ‘Don’t Look Away’ in this weekend’s Sunday Herald Sun

You name it, there’s a story. Like, loving the allure of wearing mum’s nail polish as a lad, being racist towards Indigenous player Chris Johnson on the field, gambling $10,000 on a US basketball game and betting big on the Premier League soccer, and having a punch-on with great friend Anthony Stevens after a comment was made by someone at a barbecue about Kelli Stevens, then someone ended up in the pool, punches were thrown, there were black eyes … blah, blah, blah.

It’s all there. The bars and benders, in Sydney, Melbourne and in the US, and the dress-ups, the wigs and the times Danielle was nearly caught.

While her marriage did eventually fail, it at least allowed Danielle to live a more honest life.

The drugs finally caught up with her. She found herself at St Kilda police station and the photos were circulated. With tears flowing, she was strip-searched. Led to her cell, a guard asked her: “Who was the best player you coached?” Danielle told him to f--k off. He asked again. She called him a c--t.

Humour is part of her storytelling. It helps to break the ice. But she wasn’t always so bouncy, not publicly at least. For she kept a secret, a massive secret, – and while she mainly lived as Dean, her torment grew because she wanted to be Danielle.

“The humour has always been there,” she says. “I look back now and if you asked around the AFL enough, and you asked people about me, to describe me, some people might have said introverted, quiet, unsociable, aloof. Other people would’ve said volcano, that I got angry at the drop of a hat.”

Former player Jess Sinclair called her the “Bible” because she was hard to read. But the mood swings explain “what was going on underneath”.

“It wasn’t me, and it drove me insane because my life was compartmentalised,” she says.

“Underneath, I was wishing I could tell them why.

“Now, I have been able to go back and have conversations about those times. Like sitting in Donald McDonald’s office when he was the footy manager and him asking me, ‘Why are you so angry?’. I’d look across the desk and think, ‘I wish I could tell you’.

“To go back now and piece those times together with people, they get it. There’s been some funny times reconnecting, which invariably has been great fun.”

There were dinners with the Kangaroos boys and Eagles players at “Bluey” McKenna’s joint, and Adam Simpson hosted a night for the old Kangaroos in Western Australia when Danielle went home.

A compartmentalised life

Asked to describe her old life, she says: “Compartmentalised.” That’s boxes everywhere: School. Footy. Friends. Transgender. AFL. Coaching. Drugs. The complexity of all that is utterly bewildering.

“I had to be this person to these people, this person to these people, this person to these people, and it took until my 54th birthday where I had just a dinner at the London Tavern in Richmond, where I had some family, I had friends, I had colleagues who I work with and had people from the transgender community. For the first time in my life I had my whole life around me,“ she says.

“It felt wonderful. It’s taken a while to get here but life is a hell of a lot easier just being you, and not having to have a compartmentalised life.”

At her recent court case, several footy identities, including former coaches Mark Williams and Denis Pagan, wrote glowingly of their friend. The references noted that this version of Danielle, which at the time was zeroed in on the drugs and stalking, was not the person they knew.

Which was curious because did anyone really know Danielle Laidley?

“Not the one I knew, and they didn’t know the whole person,” she says. “I wouldn’t let people in or get close to me.

“Obviously my three children and my wife at the time, we moved over from Perth and it was just us.

“That was my world – footy and them.

“When I started to tell people about me, there was a couple who I am very, very close to and I said to Tina: ‘Did you ever think of me as a …’. She said: ‘I’ve known you for 30 years, I always thought there was underlying sadness’.’’

Was there?

“It may have come across that way, that there was something behind the person being me,” Danielle says.

“I didn’t think it was sadness but perhaps it came through. I’m very proud of what I did in the first phase of my life. I am very proud of my family.

“And, you know, I always thought football would kill me.”

Anyone who knew Danielle when she was coaching North Melbourne from 2003-09 would testify that she was obsessed with the game. As she says, she was addicted.

“Eventually, how it all panned out, the football tribe and the sum of all parts, has invariably saved my life,” Danielle says.

“No doubt. And I’m so very thankful of that.”

The drugs are long gone, too.

“Everyone says the drugs, the drugs, but it just wasn’t in my life,” she says.

“The drugs were the tip of the iceberg. It was behaviour which manifested out of family. Going into rehab and coming out, that’s just well and truly left behind.

“Life is great. I remember telling someone that life’s going to be worth living now. I’m going to get fulfilment now being me, and I get that every day now.”

I’m not a hero for telling my story

Danielle has told her truth to her family and friends, and now she’s telling the truth to the wider world.

She says she’s not a hero, but she is. There are tens of thousands of adults and kids challenged by their sexuality and curious about their gender identity, and Danielle is a beacon – Australia’s version of Caitlyn Jenner.

“It’s a lifetime in the making, and it’s been let out into the big wide world,” she says.

She’s written a book called Don’t Look Away which is both “exciting and scary”.

“It’s my story and I’m proud of the fact that I’m here today,” she says.

“There were times when I thought I’d never get here.

“I’m going to live my life and if that means, at times, in different platforms, I get to speak about the transgender community, I’ll do that.

“I don’t see myself by any stretch of the imagination as a hero.

“The feedback and support has been wonderful.

“There’s going to be some knockers out there and that’s OK, too. But I’ll go about living my life and if that means people look up to me, I’m ready for that.

“If I can break down the barriers for mature-age transgender people, people who are starting to transition or the next generation of people, if I can break down barriers and it makes life easier for them, that’s what I’ll do. Sometimes, the first person who walks through the door ends up bloody and marred and they get a punch in the nose, of which I’ve received a couple, and that’s par for the course.”

Unquestionably, Danielle is living the life she always wanted. She’s in love and has absolute control of her life – and pride bursts from her when she talks.

And that she gave up smoking cigarettes four months ago has her mightily chuffed.

“Life is good. Never been better,” she says.

Don’t Look Away by Danielle Laidley will be published by HarperCollins on August 30 and is available to pre-order now from Booktopia.